The statistics on addiction to social media are considerably higher than you are describing in this article. For example, this study found that one third of adolescents are showing an addictive trajectory: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2835481
Given the number of adolescents with access to social media, this is a huge number. That is why this is a public health threat. We do not allow adolescent access to other substances that are this addictive. If social media had to go through the FDA, it would be a scheduled substance.
You are addressing individuals, but as a society we need to push back and normalize non-screen activities, delay electronic devices, delay social media, and provide devices that are not smart-enabled if parents and kids insist that they must be able to reach each other at all times.
When you have been in clinical practice, as I have, and you see the problems multiplied thousands of times over, you realize the scale of this issue. It is not helpful when people hang out a shingle and declare their own expertise when they have not had the perspective of seeing the problem on a population level.
Fortunately, millions of parents around the world are mobilizing around this issue and other countries are enacting legal constraints. We should be doing the same, but in the meantime, we should be keeping our children away from these products that, as you describe, are purposely designed to be addictive.
The study you linked has a big problem. It doesn't control for the biggest variable that would make the study causal: underlying mental health preconditions. One of the first studies that actually controlled for that found that preconditions exacerbated any negative effects that social media might have. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02134-4
That is not to say that there are no harms in social media, but the literature is far from conclusive. Besides, even the jury in the CA case mentioned that the expert testimony was mixed. How can we jump to conclusions that social media is addictive when in reality, not even researchers can be certain about the effects of SM. (https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Meta.pdf). The author of the article clearly shows that the effects in some kids cannot be generalized to every kid.
I absolutely agree that parents should foster more non-screen activities, but blaming social media seems like a cop-out for actually digging deeper as to why teens have such bad mental health nowadays. I mean the second you go beyond social media, you see other variables coming into play https://substack.com/@eselster1/p-186087964
The legal theory established by the Meta cases has only opened a can of worms regarding the liability regime (I mean, do you realize what harmful product design even entails? The product design the case refers to is speech. Also, the ruling goes beyond social media), and while I am not a big fan of how these SM companies are either, the ruling seem just like a moral victory, not actual progress in addressing the problems that parents and policymakers are concerned about.
I actually did not say anything about causation; I simply pointed out the number of kids that the study found that had an addictive trajectory and stated that this is a huge public health problem. There may be people that have addictive tendencies toward any substance, but they are not going to get addicted if they are not exposed to the substance. And I disagree that harmful design is "speech"; it is actually persuasive product design purposely placed to keep people on screens as long as possible. There are other studies that show a temporal relationship between screen time and mental health effects, and there are studies that show that removing screens improves mental health, but I did not discuss these here in my comment.
I'm sorry, but if you can't even make the case that there is causation, jumping straight to addiction is a weak argument. With all due respect, if you are a practitioner and can't even point to a piece of evidence, I recommend you take a look at the literature or even peek at the studies I linked. If by "temporal relationship" you mean longitudinal studies, there are so many methodological inconsistencies in these types of studies that their results are hardly reliable. The same with studies removing screens for an amount of time. Link to a study that controls for mental health conditions or has a consistent timeframe compared to other studies. I agree with the statement that there is a public health problem, but just saying it's social media is a weak assertion.
And to your point that harmful design is not speech, what is it? If you are referring to algorithms, you know these have a legal precedent of being protected speech, right? Also, what do algorithms recommend? Content, and what is content? Not speech? Ok, let's point out other design features that could be harmful? Comment sections, what are those? Oh, not speech. Also, which platform design features are addictive exactly? Push notifications? You can deactivate them. You see how assessing platform design, inherently harmful as a broad category, can be problematic to speech?
To conclude, just peek at studies showing addictive features. If you spend more than 30 minutes reviewing the literature, labelling social media as addictive is at best a weak case.
Thank you for this great summary! For my kids, I try to offer alternatives to the usual online activities. This weekend we made a fun little coding game, and I was so happy because they loved it. We made it public, so you can also try it: https://scientistmom.github.io/codebot/
Interesting & helpful! I appreciate the nuance/difference from “true addiction”. The way you describe it makes social media seem more like alcohol than, say, heroin. Which may be a useful analogy as parents, teachers, communities, and society try to figure out appropriate boundaries. The similarities I see are: high-risk individuals are more likely to develop dysfunctional relationships with the substance; younger individuals are less likely to make good choices, and early (unguided) exposure may increase chances of overuse; social context has a huge effect on usage. Which is to say that some of the same kinds of boundaries may make sense! Modeling and talking about healthy use in families; legal protections keeping children from being the primary consumer; work to build healthy social networks that don’t rely on social media, etc.
Your research reminds me: it doesn’t have to be “addictive” to deserve common sense boundaries, legal & social change!
I really appreciate your nuanced take here – especially the distinction between clinically significant addiction and the more common pattern of “very heavy use that still derails important parts of life.” From the vantage point of a former product leader, those two patterns can look surprisingly similar in the dashboards I used to watch every day.
What strikes me, reading your piece alongside coverage of the recent trial, is how much of this comes down to where a young person’s “real life” is located. I’ve spent the last couple years driving across the country, talking with parents, kids, and small‑town pastors and coaches about boys in particular. The story I keep hearing is that the less rooted a teenager is in a tangible community – people who notice when he doesn’t show up, adults who will call his bluff when bravado turns toward recklessness – the more the screens become the primary arena where he tests out what it means to be strong, desirable, or grown‑up.
In that context, design choices like infinite scroll or autoplay aren’t just “features.” They become the architecture of an informal initiation ritual. A 13‑year‑old doesn’t get a speech from an elder about responsibility. He gets a for‑you page that slowly teaches him which performances of masculinity draw the most attention. The problem isn’t only that some subset of kids cross a diagnostic threshold. It’s that a much larger group are quietly outsourcing their rites of passage to systems that have no stake in the kind of adults they become.
I’m curious how you think about practical bridges between your research and the small, local institutions that used to host those transitions: schools, faith communities, sports leagues, scouting, even hunting and outdoor programs. Is there a role for psychologists and technologists to partner more directly with those “analogue” institutions, so that when verdicts like this hit the headlines, parents and community leaders have somewhere to look besides either total panic or resigned acceptance?
If you’re ever interested in perspectives from folks who helped design some of these systems and then had to reckon with the downstream effects on their own kids, I’d be glad to compare notes. I suspect the more we can get technologists, clinicians, and old‑fashioned community builders in the same conversation, the less likely it is that courts have to serve as the primary venue for our cultural soul‑searching.
Thank you for your thoughts on this very current topic. I actually wrote an article touching on the danger of screens a while back, more in relation to children's reading. Would be curious to hear your perspective on it. Hope you don't mind me attaching a link here: https://samuelkammin.substack.com/p/reading-screens-and-the-changing
The statistics on addiction to social media are considerably higher than you are describing in this article. For example, this study found that one third of adolescents are showing an addictive trajectory: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2835481
Given the number of adolescents with access to social media, this is a huge number. That is why this is a public health threat. We do not allow adolescent access to other substances that are this addictive. If social media had to go through the FDA, it would be a scheduled substance.
You are addressing individuals, but as a society we need to push back and normalize non-screen activities, delay electronic devices, delay social media, and provide devices that are not smart-enabled if parents and kids insist that they must be able to reach each other at all times.
When you have been in clinical practice, as I have, and you see the problems multiplied thousands of times over, you realize the scale of this issue. It is not helpful when people hang out a shingle and declare their own expertise when they have not had the perspective of seeing the problem on a population level.
Fortunately, millions of parents around the world are mobilizing around this issue and other countries are enacting legal constraints. We should be doing the same, but in the meantime, we should be keeping our children away from these products that, as you describe, are purposely designed to be addictive.
The study you linked has a big problem. It doesn't control for the biggest variable that would make the study causal: underlying mental health preconditions. One of the first studies that actually controlled for that found that preconditions exacerbated any negative effects that social media might have. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02134-4
That is not to say that there are no harms in social media, but the literature is far from conclusive. Besides, even the jury in the CA case mentioned that the expert testimony was mixed. How can we jump to conclusions that social media is addictive when in reality, not even researchers can be certain about the effects of SM. (https://www.christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media%20Meta.pdf). The author of the article clearly shows that the effects in some kids cannot be generalized to every kid.
I absolutely agree that parents should foster more non-screen activities, but blaming social media seems like a cop-out for actually digging deeper as to why teens have such bad mental health nowadays. I mean the second you go beyond social media, you see other variables coming into play https://substack.com/@eselster1/p-186087964
The legal theory established by the Meta cases has only opened a can of worms regarding the liability regime (I mean, do you realize what harmful product design even entails? The product design the case refers to is speech. Also, the ruling goes beyond social media), and while I am not a big fan of how these SM companies are either, the ruling seem just like a moral victory, not actual progress in addressing the problems that parents and policymakers are concerned about.
I actually did not say anything about causation; I simply pointed out the number of kids that the study found that had an addictive trajectory and stated that this is a huge public health problem. There may be people that have addictive tendencies toward any substance, but they are not going to get addicted if they are not exposed to the substance. And I disagree that harmful design is "speech"; it is actually persuasive product design purposely placed to keep people on screens as long as possible. There are other studies that show a temporal relationship between screen time and mental health effects, and there are studies that show that removing screens improves mental health, but I did not discuss these here in my comment.
I'm sorry, but if you can't even make the case that there is causation, jumping straight to addiction is a weak argument. With all due respect, if you are a practitioner and can't even point to a piece of evidence, I recommend you take a look at the literature or even peek at the studies I linked. If by "temporal relationship" you mean longitudinal studies, there are so many methodological inconsistencies in these types of studies that their results are hardly reliable. The same with studies removing screens for an amount of time. Link to a study that controls for mental health conditions or has a consistent timeframe compared to other studies. I agree with the statement that there is a public health problem, but just saying it's social media is a weak assertion.
And to your point that harmful design is not speech, what is it? If you are referring to algorithms, you know these have a legal precedent of being protected speech, right? Also, what do algorithms recommend? Content, and what is content? Not speech? Ok, let's point out other design features that could be harmful? Comment sections, what are those? Oh, not speech. Also, which platform design features are addictive exactly? Push notifications? You can deactivate them. You see how assessing platform design, inherently harmful as a broad category, can be problematic to speech?
To conclude, just peek at studies showing addictive features. If you spend more than 30 minutes reviewing the literature, labelling social media as addictive is at best a weak case.
Thank you for this great summary! For my kids, I try to offer alternatives to the usual online activities. This weekend we made a fun little coding game, and I was so happy because they loved it. We made it public, so you can also try it: https://scientistmom.github.io/codebot/
Interesting & helpful! I appreciate the nuance/difference from “true addiction”. The way you describe it makes social media seem more like alcohol than, say, heroin. Which may be a useful analogy as parents, teachers, communities, and society try to figure out appropriate boundaries. The similarities I see are: high-risk individuals are more likely to develop dysfunctional relationships with the substance; younger individuals are less likely to make good choices, and early (unguided) exposure may increase chances of overuse; social context has a huge effect on usage. Which is to say that some of the same kinds of boundaries may make sense! Modeling and talking about healthy use in families; legal protections keeping children from being the primary consumer; work to build healthy social networks that don’t rely on social media, etc.
Your research reminds me: it doesn’t have to be “addictive” to deserve common sense boundaries, legal & social change!
I really appreciate your nuanced take here – especially the distinction between clinically significant addiction and the more common pattern of “very heavy use that still derails important parts of life.” From the vantage point of a former product leader, those two patterns can look surprisingly similar in the dashboards I used to watch every day.
What strikes me, reading your piece alongside coverage of the recent trial, is how much of this comes down to where a young person’s “real life” is located. I’ve spent the last couple years driving across the country, talking with parents, kids, and small‑town pastors and coaches about boys in particular. The story I keep hearing is that the less rooted a teenager is in a tangible community – people who notice when he doesn’t show up, adults who will call his bluff when bravado turns toward recklessness – the more the screens become the primary arena where he tests out what it means to be strong, desirable, or grown‑up.
In that context, design choices like infinite scroll or autoplay aren’t just “features.” They become the architecture of an informal initiation ritual. A 13‑year‑old doesn’t get a speech from an elder about responsibility. He gets a for‑you page that slowly teaches him which performances of masculinity draw the most attention. The problem isn’t only that some subset of kids cross a diagnostic threshold. It’s that a much larger group are quietly outsourcing their rites of passage to systems that have no stake in the kind of adults they become.
I’m curious how you think about practical bridges between your research and the small, local institutions that used to host those transitions: schools, faith communities, sports leagues, scouting, even hunting and outdoor programs. Is there a role for psychologists and technologists to partner more directly with those “analogue” institutions, so that when verdicts like this hit the headlines, parents and community leaders have somewhere to look besides either total panic or resigned acceptance?
If you’re ever interested in perspectives from folks who helped design some of these systems and then had to reckon with the downstream effects on their own kids, I’d be glad to compare notes. I suspect the more we can get technologists, clinicians, and old‑fashioned community builders in the same conversation, the less likely it is that courts have to serve as the primary venue for our cultural soul‑searching.
Thank you for your thoughts on this very current topic. I actually wrote an article touching on the danger of screens a while back, more in relation to children's reading. Would be curious to hear your perspective on it. Hope you don't mind me attaching a link here: https://samuelkammin.substack.com/p/reading-screens-and-the-changing